I'm kicking off the year in a big way: my photography course for kids has been published in paperback and is now available for purchase on Amazon!

The course can be incorporated into homeschools, co-ops, classrooms, and families looking to supplement traditional education. It can work with any school schedule, whether traditional, year-round, or piecemeal as you have time. You can learn more about the curriculum here.

I decided to offer a paperback version to make the course that much easier to implement. The 121-page paperback is 8x10 inches, making it easily portable for field trips and travel. The content is the same as the digital download, but you no longer have to take the time and money to print it. Plus shipping is free.

To celebrate the paperback publication, I'm discounting both versions of the curriculum right now. (More power to you if you've gone paperless.) You can head to my curriculum page to order the digital download, or straight to Amazon to purchase the paperback.

If you order the paperback and enjoy the course with your kids, I would love for you to consider writing a review on Amazon. More positive reviews will make the course more searchable and help get it into the hands of more students.

I'm going to try to post more of my girls' photography over on my Instagram feed throughout the spring and summer and talk about how we're working our way through the lessons. I hope you'll start sharing work over there from this course with the tag #documentyourworld . Happy snapping!

I may receive a small commission from the Amazon affiliated link on this page at no additional cost to you.

Lately I've been frustrated trying to find a photography course for my elementary-aged kids that doesn't underestimate their abilities or introduce concepts at a high-school or college level. So this summer I sat down and wrote the intro photography course I wish I could have taken as a kid when I got my first camera at age 7.

But first let me explain why this class should be an important feature of your curriculum.

HOW DOES PHOTOGRAPHY BENEFIT THE DEVELOPING MIND?

As a photographer and writer, I believe there is something profound in bearing witness to the joy and pain in others’ lives, to the beautiful and mundane in this world. To quiet your body and mind, to observe what is in front of you, to learn how to find the thread of a story, to document it from a unique perspective, to transform it into something extraordinary—these are some of the most essential life skills we can teach our children.Why? Because effective storytelling is what propels us through life. It doesn’t matter what particular careers we pursue; college essays, job applications, grant proposals, social media marketing—they all force us to weave engaging stories to convince our audience to feel a certain way.Storytelling matters. While I hope your children grow to enjoy photography as an artistic expression, I’ll tell you right now: they don’t need to become professional photographers to benefit greatly from learning how to look closely, to document life, and to communicate more effectively. The basic photography skills your children will gain from working through this course are the building blocks of an artist, but they are also transferrable to other forms of storytelling the world will expect your children to master along the way.

Your children don’t have to wait to learn photography fundamentals until they can handle a high school or college photography course that requires thousands of dollars of equipment and the ability to understand the relationships between shutter speed, aperture, and ISO. Meet them at their level and help them get started with this course. They can start building their foundational skills now.

​Now for some details about the course.

COURSE INFORMATION

Students will first familiarize themselves with the camera they'll be using, then learn some basics about light, composition, and perspective before moving on to experiment with a few genres of photography. Next they'll learn about storytelling through photography. They'll wrap up the course by creating their own photo series.

You do NOT need a fancy DSLR camera to take this course; you just need a mobile phone camera or a basic point-and-shoot.

You do NOT need photography experience to teach this course. (And even if you are a professional photographer, the course will help you break down concepts into digestible bits for your kids in ways you may not have considered.)

Course details:

85-page downloadable PDF

Nine lessons, each comprised of one lecture and four related activities

​Well my goal of posting our Around the World book lists shortly after we finished each unit fell by the wayside pretty quickly. I'm going to try to zip through them without much commentary and get as many posted as I can over the next few weeks before we start our new school year. We made it through all the continents during the 2017-2018 school year, so just send me a line if you're looking for a specific book list before I've posted it.

ActivitiesIdentified and labeled Antarctica maps. Wrote stories about penguins. Visited penguins, sharks and other creatures at the Greensboro Science Center. Wrote and illustrated penguin fact sheets. Snow day fun (actually multiple snow days of fun): sledding, snow forts and snowballs. Studied explorers and their trials, successes and mishaps.

We might be past our last blast of winter, but I know many of you are still in the thick of it. I bet your kids will enjoy these wonderful books we recently read about the Arctic. I choose January to study the Arctic and Antarctica (which I'll post next), because it's probably our best shot of getting any snow down here in North Carolina.

Luckily for us, we did have two beautiful snow storms during this unit. What does a snow day look like in our homeschool? Plenty of sledding, hot chocolate, reading and art projects. It's not much different from our usual, casual approach to learning. The books below were a perfect addition to our cozy winter.

ActivitiesIdentified and labeled the Arctic region on maps. Studied resident and migrant animals, migration, and adaptations to the extreme climate. Lots of snow play, sledding, snowball fights and building snow forts. Learned about snowflake formation, icebergs, ice caps and glaciers. Read about building an igloo. Wrote stories about Arctic animals. Made clay igloos, polar bears and arctic foxes. Studied "What Makes Night and Day" (and why nights and days have different lengths in the Arctic than where we live). Made sun and earth models out of clay to demonstrate rotating and revolving. Read about what why we have different seasons, and how those seasons vary from our own in the Arctic. Field trip: NC Zoo to visit the polar bears and arctic foxes.

We finished up our study of the African continent just before the holidays with a week-long focus on Egypt. I suspect you'll enjoy reading the books we found. Our favorites were the top two on the list.

ActivitiesLocated and labeled Egypt on map. Read about contemporary Egypt and the Nile. Wrote stories set in Egypt. Studied Nile crocodiles and painted pictures of them. Studied ancient Egypt and read letter from Isabelle (Letters from Afar) about her exploration of Egypt and the Great Pyramids. Compared and contrasted “The Egyptian Cindarella” and Disney’s “Cinderella” using a Venn diagram. Spent a day studying, drawing and writing about caracals (wild cats) at the Carolina Tiger Rescue.

We took a delightful literary trip across Southern Africa last week with stops through Madagascar and South Africa.

Madagascar captured my heart 14 years ago when I spent a summer there doing primate field research. Little did I know that years down the line, it would capture my kids' hearts too. By this point, between visits to and camp at my old stomping ground, the Duke Lemur Center, plenty of books and photos, and a healthy collection of stuffed lemurs, the girls now know as much as I do about Madagascar and conservation issues. But we still enjoyed spending a day reading and writing about one of our favorite places.

South African culture and wildlife also fascinated the girls. Since our cousin just spent the year working with great white sharks in South Africa, we thought it would be interesting to study great whites too. One day we hope to take a closer look at them...from an underwater cage.

Activities​Identified and labeled Madagascar and South Africa on map. Explored Malagasy culture by studying paintings, fabrics, jewelry, crafts, photos and books. Wrote stories about lemurs. Wrote book reports on Nelson Mandela. Inspired by Ndebele women of South Africa in "My Painted House," beaded necklaces and painted our own house drawings. Used "My Painted House" for lesson on nouns and adjectives. Studied and painted pictures of great white sharks. Field trip planned to aquarium to see sharks.

Friends, I’ve gone bananas buying books. While I’m excited to be adding 20 books about Africa to our collection (we’ve also read stacks and stacks of library books), I’ve realized we’ll never make it around the world by the end of the school year at this pace. Once we wrap up Africa, we’ll probably have to limit our studies to about 10 pieces of literature (plus library reference-type books) per continent.

Something I neglected to mention in my first post about our Around the World unit study is that we’ll try to “visit” countries that have significance to our family along the way. Since we have family from Ethiopia, we made sure to stop there on our journey.

The Best Beekeeper of Lalibela: A Tale from Africa (Ethiopia) by Kessler (We didn’t actually read this one yet. I could only find it used for at least $30 and decided to buy it when I find it for a better price or during a less intense book-buying month.)

In my first post, I split up our summary of activities by subject, but that didn’t really make sense since unit studies are interdisciplinary by nature. So from here on out, I’ll combine our geography/sciences, language, art and culture projects into one summary.

I realized after ordering all our books that I failed to find literature from Central Africa. Instead we briefly studied its rainforests and read several books about gorillas and chimpanzees.

ActivitiesIdentified countries of study on map. Drew maps of the Serengeti’s great migration. Painted Lake Tanganyika. Inspired by “The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind,” made models of inventions that could help people: rafts for people living in flood-prone areas. Discussed tropical rainforests (we’ll study them more thoroughly when we get to Central and South America). Wrote brief animal reports about gorillas. Illustrated reports with watercolor paintings of gorillas. Wrote fictional stories set in Ethiopia. Made Ethiopian honey bread (and enjoyed it over tea/coffee). Took field trip to the zoo to visit animals of Africa.

​Yes, I wish my kids joy and happiness. But I also wish them the ability to empathize with their fellow human beings. I wish them the ability to recognize themselves as global citizens—an existence that comes with great responsibility to the Earth and each inhabitant and ecosystem alike, particularly the most vulnerable among us. I wish them the ability to think critically—to fully understand the concept and process of evidence-based reasoning and demand evidence over ignorance at every level they encounter.

But wishing is not enough. Instilling these skills and values will take work.

We began homeschooling in August, so my kids’ formal academic instruction sits squarely on my shoulders. Two months in, I started to evaluate how we were spending our time, what was working, what was not. Yes, we were learning to add and read and write in complete sentences—all those necessary stepping stones for academic success. But nothing in our curriculum was edging us toward understanding global citizenship in a meaningful way.

So I scrapped some of our curriculum and began to design an “Around the World” unit study, which will take us to a new region each month or two (roughly, but not exactly by continent). Through mostly “living books,” as Charlotte Mason would call them (interesting literature instead of textbooks), we’ll use each region as a framework to study geography, biology, geology, culture, language and history.

When I was in school, history and geography studies were usually framed around the same thing: how, when and why men fought men over land and power, and who was victorious. There is plenty of time later to learn all of that. But doesn’t a child deserve to view the world with awe? (I realize that while all children deserve to view the world with awe, many do not have the luxury. We are privileged to be able to offer this viewpoint at this time.) I would like to expose my kids, the older of whom are just 5 and 6, to fascinating aspects of the world and the goodness of so many of its people, despite humanity’s perpetual violence.

My goals are to find literature focusing on the following themes:

-People, especially women and children, whose sense of empathy for others led them to contribute in interesting and inspirational way to their communities, whether through small, thoughtful actions or in large-scale ways.

-The interconnectedness and remarkability of all life forms and our responsibilities as stewards of the Earth, particularly through the exploration of ecosystems and threats to their health, and ways conservationists and citizens can work to reduce these threats. (We do nature and STEM studies beyond the Around the World unit study, as well.)

-The celebration of cultures and languages in ways that promote respect for and admiration of diversity, not fear or negativity.

As I began to search for literature suggestions, I read a blog post by a woman who admitted that despite trying to teach her kids to celebrate diversity, she realized one day in horror when she looked at her bookshelves that their literature collection was anything but diverse. When I read her words, I felt a knot growing in my stomach. Our bookshelves are not nearly as diverse as they could or should be if we are serious about raising global citizens. We’ve got work to do.

Finding age-appropriate literature online can be tricky, since reading levels are not always well labeled. So the first thing I did was buy this reference book: “Give Your Child the World: Raising Globally Minded Kids One Book at a Time,” by Jamie C. Martin. She divides her book suggestions by region and age level. The religiosity of her introduction made me worry her recommendation lists would focus on books with a Christian world view instead of incorporating a diversity of viewpoints, but I haven’t found that concern to be true so far. Most of the books below come from Martin’s suggestions.

I decided to start our unit study in Africa, partially because my heart has always been there, but also because Nora is obsessed with lions. I wanted to win her over fast on our new school approach. And I may have gotten a little excited about all the literature Martin suggests (plus more from digging around online) and ordered so many books that we may never reach another continent. (Lesson learned: pick a handful or two of books per region and then move on, or you won’t make it around the world in a year.) We started two weeks ago in East Africa and will work our way around the continent in five sub-units.

(I should note that not all authors and illustrators from this list are native to the countries or regions about which they write.)

You could go in so many directions with these books, and I have a full list of activities and assignments we won’t even get to this round. But here is a quick summary of how we approached our studies.

Geography: Identified the continent of Africa on a world map. Identified on a map the country or region where each story takes place and where each animal lives.

Language: Produced several creative writing assignments related to the literature and species/ecosystems studied. Compared and contrasted two books based on the life and work of the same woman. Read books with Swahili numbers and phrasing mixed in. (My goal isn’t for them to memorize every language we encounter along our journey, but to understand and respect the use of different languages—to hear or read a word in a different language and think, “I’d like to learn more about that language,” instead of, “Well that sounds funny!”)

Biological Sciences: Organized studies around “Savanna Food Chain.” Drew savanna food chain and energy pyramid. Studied plants or animals from each level of the energy pyramid, and drew pictures or wrote stories or reports to reinforce the knowledge. Wrote about the hunting techniques of a specific savanna predator. Learned about the great migration and why animals migrate (food!). Learned about endangered species of the savanna, poaching and environmental degradation. Will be visiting the zoo’s Africa exhibit next week.

Culture and Art: Tried hand at painting animals in a traditional style. Made Kenyan pancakes. Painted and drew numerous pictures of African wildlife. Read books set in rural villages.

Other: We were all were quite enthralled by the two stories about Wangari Maathai, the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize for her work that resulted in the planting (or replanting) of more than 30 million trees in Kenya. We will be planting a tree in Wangari’s memory in our front yard.

One night, Nora asked me to read the books about Wangari again and then said, “Mom, I want to do something to help EVERYONE in the world, like how Wangari helped Kenya. What can I do?” I knew in that moment we were on the right track. And I’ll be clinging to that moment as we move forward.

Whether you’re homeschooling or just want to increase the diversity of your children’s literature collection, I hope you’ll follow along as I post our book lists and activities throughout the year.

Hello there

I'm Julia Soplop, writer and photographer. I believe there is something profound in bearing witness to moments of joy and pain in others’ lives. My husband, three girls and I live outside of Chapel Hill, NC. You can read more about me here.